Hello good folk of the digital fields 
Has anybody tried pluging more than 24 hdds via sata pcie expanders on Windows 11 ?
I came across some information that in windows 11 number of attached drives are not limited by alphabet letters.
Havent really found this topic and seems everybody loves linux and uses JBODs and NAS.
Are you talking about mounting drives to folders etc?
No, I was thinking about automatic assignment when you plug HDDs via Sata or usb 3.
And what do you think happens when you run out of drive letters?
You can have a lot. But If it was automatic (which it is not), you would not be asking how to do it… yes?
I have 28 drives attached. Windows give 26 drive letters including boot drive C: . Over 26, you can put the disk as a directory inside an available disk. Sometimes it does not give drive letter auto but you can see it on the list of “disk manager” as a disk number. When you have an unused letter but windows does not see the drive, open disk manager. If you see the disk on the list, then you can give a drive letter manually. If the disk has some errors and it says the disk was not started, then start the disk. But if you can not start the disk, there is a way to save the disk:
Note down the disk number. Open command prompt as administrator. Write down “diskpart” then “select disk x”. Then “clean”. This erases the disk contents and the partition then you can start and format the disk.
Yes, I dont know how to assign manually to have more than 25. I would be great for some instructions. I never dealt with that so I am total noob.
Thanks man! will try in that way.
Considering that disks are full of plots formatting is not an option 
What do you think ? I dont know, thats why I am asking
When you attach a disk it will appear in disk management (subsection of computer management) you can chose whether you want to assign the disk a letter or mount it as a folder.
I have around 50 drives mounted on my machine in a folder on the c: drive. This folder contains a link (created by windows when you mount it) to the physical drive. This linked disk is just seen as a folder by windows and chia, just like if you created a child folder.
I hope this helps and I didn’t explain it badly. It’s fairly simply to set up and even simpler to use.
In Windows search box, search for “computer management”, and click on it.
Note that you will need administrator access to access your drives to make changes.
If you are logged in to your computer as a standard user, then when you start “computer management”, you will need to right-click it and run it as an administrator.
If you are logged in to your computer as an administrator, then you can start “computer management” without needing to right-click it.
When the tool opens, you will need to click on “Disk Management” (you might have to open the “Storage” branch to see Disk Management).
It might take several seconds to load the listing of your drives.
Find the drive you want to work with. Look for it in the section where I put yellow highlights.
Right-click on the drive, and choose:
“Change Drive Letter and Paths…”
On the next window, it will show you your current drive letter.
Remove that drive letter (there is a “Remove” button).
You will get a warning that programs, etc, will lose access. Accept it.
Then click on the “Add” button, and choose:
“Mount in the following empty NTFS folder”
Then click on:
“Browse”
At this point, you will need to choose an empty folder.
You could have created an empty folder already, or you will see an option to create a new folder. It is all the same. You just need an empty folder.
Once you choose your empty folder, that will be the location of the drive that you clicked on.
So when you browse to that folder, you will see the data from that drive, just as you would have if it had a drive letter.
I suggest that you create the empty folder with a name such as “drives”, or “mounts”, or “mnt”. You can choose any name you want.
Let’s say you name the empty folder “drives”.
You will then want empty folders within the “drives” folder, such as “Seagate-1”, “Seagate-2”, etc.
When you follow the instructions above, you will choose “Seagate-1”, etc, as the location for one of your drives.
The above will make it easy for you to know where all of your drives will be. They will all be in the directory:
c:\drives\Seagate-1
c:\drives\Seagate-2
c:\drives\WD-1
c:\drives\WD-2
Etc.
Thank you for your time for explanation. It helps a lot. 
You might want to make your first attempt with an unimportant drive.
Maybe a flash drive?
And maybe do a test run on a non Chia computer, where you do not have dozens of drives.
Also, when you are done mounting your drives as NTFS mount points, you will have freed up your drive letters.
And you will have to tell Chia the new location of your drives.
Yes I was planing in that way not to interfere in running harvesters.
Somebody told me that only linux OS can have like unlimited attached disks and never tought of having a pointer to disks like you explained.
I am glad I asked 
Thanks again.
By the way, you are running Windows 11. I am running Windows 10.
The disk management was the same on Windows 7, as it is on Windows 10.
So it is probably the same on Windows 11 – but I really can’t say for sure.
I run W10 and was planning to switch to 11 but now i see it’s not necessary.
Did you use letters A and B?
Exactly same in win 11.
Bot with windows and linux you can have plenty of drives.
The windows way is mentioned above. For linux, I head that the end is reached at sdz but thats incorrect. After sdz it just rolls over to sdaa and after sdzz comes sdaaa.
